On 1 May 2010, Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani-born naturalised American citizen residing in Bridgeport, Connecticut, drove an SUV loaded with explosive devices to the corner of 45th Street and Seventh Avenue in Times Square, New York. He began the detonation process, walked away, and took a train back to his apartment. The bomb failed to ignite. Police found him easily through the car's serial number. He was arrested on 3 May on board an Emirates flight to Dubai that had pulled away from the gate but had not yet been cleared for take-off.
Bridgeport is a beat-down city of 140,000, only half and hour away from yacht-friendly Westport on the Manhattan-bound commuting coastline. An abandoned port hobbled by lower-than-average incomes and education, it seems an unlikely place to call home for Faisal Shahzad, the 31-year-old, MBA-graduate son of an eminent Pakistani father. Shahzad rented a second-floor apartment (for $1,150 a month) in a three-storey tenement similar to others on the block. Recently renovated, his was the cleanest. Even so, its pale-biscuit siding was gimcrack vinyl, its chalk-white trim a flimsy metal. The garage in the back, where he assembled the bomb inside his Nissan Pathfinder, was missing its door and guarded by a barking dog on a heavy chain.
This apartment was a month-long way station for Shahzad. He spent most of his 10 years in America in Shelton, Connecticut, a slice of exurbia 15 minutes north of Bridgeport. His house there is empty and strewn with discarded toys and two lawn mowers. A front window is smashed, another above the front door gone. He abandoned it exactly one summer ago. His income as an account analyst – a position which pays on average $50,000 a year and sometimes as much as $70,000 – wasn't enough to sustain making payments on the $218,400 mortgage. Shahzad's American career began in disappointment and was mired in that house. With two degrees from the University of Bridgeport, a school so poorly rated by its peers it doesn't even have a ranking in the US News and World Report college list, the best work he could find was a series of jobs as an account analyst, the last of which he quit last summer. By his own account, Shahzad was ditching Shelton to return to Pakistan with his family.
Shahzad's father, Baharul Haq, began life as the son of a servant in Mohib Banda, a poor village near Peshawar in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, formerly called North-West Frontier Province. He trained as an airman and rose to one of the highest posts in Pakistan's air force. In a country where who you know is far more important than what you know, Haq defeated phenomenal odds. Faisal, one of four children, grew up on military bases in Peshawar, Sargodha and Karachi, studying at air force schools. His grades were average and he developed a weakness for fast cars and a taste for the Eurotrash look. "He was a loafer, always wasting his father's money," said Faiz Ahmed, a villager who knew the family. "There were problems between him and his father – Bahar sahib was tight-fisted while Faisal was a spendthrift."
Baharul Haq's economising paid off. When he retired he moved into Hayatabad, a Peshawar neighbourhood of palatial villas staffed by guards, servants and chauffeurs, favoured by foreigners, military grandees and business notables. Shahzad's Shelton neighbours, by contrast – among them a dental technician, a computer consultant, a school teacher and a nurse – drive their own mid-range cars and mow their own lawns. "He was here by himself at first," his next-door neighbour, a Shelton native, told me. "Then he got married. It was an arranged marriage. She was very quiet. I talked to him more than her. We used to talk when he was mowing the lawn. She'd had a good job. He told me they were getting the children phase over and then she was going to go back to work. He worked in Norwalk. It's 35 minutes away, but it's a terrible commute, and he used to talk about that. Much worse than he expected. I could tell he wasn't happy…"
I asked about visitors.
"It was always her family. There was a sister who came from Massachusetts. She was always in traditional dress. I don't know what you call it, but the kind of clothing you see in India."
It was the house, the neighbour said, that increasingly preoccupied him. Records show that Shahzad bought it in 2004 for $273,000. He tried to sell in 2006 for $329,000, in 2008 for $299,000, then dropped the price again. Trapped in the collapsing American housing market, he took out a second mortgage for $65,000 in January 2009.
I asked why they wanted to sell.
"He told me his parents were in Pakistan; he was the youngest child and it was the custom in their culture that it was up to him to go back and take care of the parents."
What, I asked, is the most lasting image she has of him? The videotape capturing him buying fireworks? The mugshot after his arrest?
"I see him in the yard with her."
His wife?
"The little girl. He was so good with her."
Ajani Marwat is an officer in the New York Police Department's intelligence division, formerly special services, or the "red squad". After 9/11, Adam Cohen, a streetwise Boston native formerly of the CIA, came out of retirement to revamp the division. Marwat is an unlikely Cohen acolyte. He has a sinking feeling that Jewish financiers control the world. He thinks the United States is being used by Israel to do its dirty work. But Marwat is also a man in possession of the highest-level security clearance. He is fluent in seven languages and three of them – Urdu, Pashtu and English – he shares with Faisal Shahzad. The other four – Hindi, Farsi, Dari and Tajiki – enable him to work with informants or witnesses from India, Iran and Afghanistan.
Today Marwat is sitting in my kitchen drinking tea and eating cherries. He does not want his birthplace or real name mentioned in this story; intelligence-division officers are not allowed to talk to the media. What he will do is offer a window into what he thinks motivated Shahzad, and what his New York-born colleagues do not, and perhaps cannot, understand about the Shahzads they encounter. Marwat lost eight brothers and sisters to starvation, rocket strikes and bombings in his native country. One day when he was 11, he had to go to the market to buy bread. At that time, any such excursion was a risk. His best friend went with him.
"There's a big noise. All I see is smoke. Then I can't hear anything. I look at my friend. He's running. But he has no head."
The damage that United States aerial bombing causes in Pakistan is most heavily concentrated where ethnic Pashtun live. Shahzad's family was Pashtun, and he married one. The village of Shahzad's father is only a 20-minute drive from one of the largest madrasas in Pakistan, the Darul Uloom Haqqania, widely considered the incubator for the Taliban movement. But the village itself is in Nowshera, one of the most secular districts in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, where the liberal Pakistan Peoples Party regularly wins elections. It is also not an area saturated in drone attacks. That distinction belongs to a belt of villages further southwest along the Afghanistan border.
In 2009, Shahzad abandoned his Shelton home and went to live with his parents in their posh neighbourhood in Peshawar. During that year, 47 drone attacks killed 411 people in Waziristan. Peshawar, however, suffered no drone attacks. The violence there is different. In the past year, Taliban suicide bombers have struck an average of three times a week, killing civilians in markets, mosques and police stations. As a military man, Shahzad's father's allegiance would be to the government, his sympathies with the victims of the suicide attacks in the city where he and his wife now live.
These intricacies are beyond esoteric for most NYPD police officers. Disrupting plots is more about interpretation than enforcement. But what if, as is so often the case, a man's history is not enough to fathom his future intentions? Marwat is a striking example. Like Shahzad, he too left for the west as a teenager. But Marwat didn't arrive the way Shahzad did – a proficient English speaker in designer sunglasses with a university scholarship. Marwat was a 17-year-old who slept in train stations. His life story, not Shahzad's, should have produced a militant.
Instead, Marwat's exposure to atrocity and poverty galvanised him. He laughs at what some might consider Shahzad's minor deprivations – a suburban house that wouldn't sell, a lousy commute. And he doesn't think they had much to do with Shahzad's radicalisation.
"If I put myself in his shoes, it's simple. It's American policies in his country. That's it. Americans are so closed minded. They have no idea what's going on in the rest of the world. And he did know. Every time you turn on al-Jazeera, they show our people being killed. A kid getting murdered. A woman being beaten."
"We don't have to do anything to attract them," a terrorist organiser in Lahore told me. "The Americans and the Pakistani government do our work for us. With the drone attacks targeting the innocents who live in Waziristan and the media broadcasting this news all the time, the sympathies of most of the nation are always with us. Then it's simply a case of converting these sentiments into action."
Marwat's colleagues on the force mean well, but they don't always know what to look for. "They're constantly looking to see if a guy goes to a mosque," he says. "I tell them: 'People who go to mosque – don't worry about them. People who go to mosque, they learn good things. People who don't go to mosque – you have to worry about them.'
"A lot of times when cops are interviewing people, they think everyone's a terrorist. I have to tell them: actually, the way this guy's talking, it's nothing. Every Muslim in the world thinks what this guy thinks. This is the problem. If you train American-born guys, spend a lot of money teaching Arabic, the culture, the most they get, even after all that, is 30%."
Martin Stolar was one of four lead attorneys in Handschu v Special Services Division, a landmark federal civil rights case filed on behalf of Barbara Handschu, a political activist and lawyer who represented the Black Panthers and other groups under surveillance in the 1960s. The 1985 decree that resulted prohibited unfettered police monitoring of religious or political groups. In 2002, when Adam Cohen was revamping the intelligence division, the police department sought a weakening of the Handschu decree from the original judge, paving the way for the surveillance of Muslims. They won it in 2003.
Today I'm sitting opposite Stolar in his grotty fourth-floor office above lower Broadway. He is smoking Merit cigarettes and is still hippy skinny with a beard now silvery grey. He's agreed to talk to me about the only other convicted Pakistani bomb plotter in New York City.
His client, Shahawar Matin Siraj, was found guilty of participating in a conspiracy to attack the Herald Square subway station in 2004, three days before the Republican national convention was to begin at Madison Square Garden. Siraj, 23 at the time, was sentenced to 30 years in prison. Today he's in a federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana.
Siraj's mother, Shaina Berbeen, who was a physician with her own clinic in Karachi, told me her family had left Pakistan for the US in 1999, the same year as Shahzad. They had fled persecution for being Ismailis, a branch of Shias sometimes referred to as Agakhanas. Berbeen and her daughter Saniya Siraj, now 24, tell me about the severe physical punishment of Ismaili students, including Siraj, at the hands of Sunni teachers. Berbeen also showed me a forensic psychological evaluation of her son which placed his IQ at 78, "the borderline of intellectual functioning… [a level] surpassed by 93% of the population".
In 2002 Berbeen's husband became severely ill and Siraj was the family's sole support. He worked first at fast-food chain Blimpie and then as a clerk in his uncle's store, Islamic Books and Tapes, next door to the Brooklyn mosque, Mus'ab bin Umair.
"Cohen," Stolar says, "instituted a programme directed at the Muslim community to develop confidential informants [CIs] and undercover agents. By the time we get to Siraj in 2004, I don't think there's a mosque in New York City that doesn't have a CI or an undercover."
Police sources tell me foreign-born nationals are easy to turn into CIs. If a taxi driver gets into a tussle over a fare, is reported and turns out to have immigration issues, the police can threaten him with deportation. "You become a CI and you won't be deported." It's a method the police have used for decades. Siraj had a CI assigned to him, an Egyptian nuclear engineer named Osama Eldawoody who'd been drawn in because he'd run a number of failed businesses out of his apartment, prompting neighbours to call police. The government paid Eldawoody's expenses, as well as $94,000 for his work as an informant on the case.
The undercover officer in Siraj's case was a native of Bangladesh who used the pseudonym Kamil Pasha. "He's recruited in the classic NYPD way," Stolar says. "They troll the police academy to find someone who fits the targeted group. They started doing this with the Black Panther party back in the 60s. So they get someone who's, number one, young and number two, not known on the street. And they say. 'We promise you a gold shield, a detective's shield, if you do this.'"
The cop and the CI had no knowledge of each other. In July 2003 they began visiting the bookstore where Siraj was working. Eldawoody, 50 at the time, was old enough to be Siraj's father; Pasha, at 23, was more of a buddy. In 72 visits with Siraj, he was able to cull what the jury considered "radical statements", such as Siraj praising Osama Bin Laden as "a talented brother and a great planner".
None of Pasha and Siraj's conversations were tape-recorded and Eldawoody only began recording their encounters after he'd been meeting with Siraj for nine months. It's hard, therefore, to gauge what role the two men played in the conversation about the planned bomb attack.
In April 2004 the images of torture from Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad surfaced. When Siraj saw the image of the hooded Iraqi prisoner, attached to wires, standing on a box, he became hysterical. "Turn it off, Mommy! Turn it off," Siraj shrieked at her. Trial testimony showed that Eldawoody gave him photographs of a Muslim girl being raped by a dog. He is soon discussing the placement of the bomb with Siraj and his co-defendant, a 21-year-old schizophrenic Egyptian who turned state's evidence in the case. Siraj, in this recording, says, "No killing. Only economic problems." He explains: "If somebody dies, then the blame will come on me. Allah doesn't see those situations as accidents." In earlier audio recordings, however, he has said, "I want at least 1,000 to 2,000 to die in one day."
At one point, under pressure from Eldawoody, Siraj puts him off by saying: "I'll have to check with my mother." He never did. Berbeen said she never met either of the men who spent so much time with her son. But her daughter did. "He was suspicious," Siraj's sister said. "First of all, nobody helps anyone in America. He's giving my brother rides all the time. It costs a lot of money to drive from Bay Ridge to Queens. One time Eldawoody told my dad: 'Your son is a diamond. A hero.' I think no one ever saw Matin that way. You know, it's like Batman. He wanted to be a superhero. Honestly, all my brother did in his spare time was video games. I think, on some level, he wanted to be in one of them."
"This guy was a nebbish," Stolar says. "Look, I'm a defence attorney. I know how to make shit up and bend the facts, but this wasn't bending the facts. This was classic entrapment."
On Monday 21 June I was among the reporters filing into the granite, marble and mahogany courtroom of federal judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum in Manhattan. We'd come for Faisal Shahzad's arraignment after a federal grand jury had returned a 10-count terrorism indictment. We expected a five-minute perfunctory exchange; Shahzad would probably enter the typical not guilty plea.
Shahzad was cuffed and shackled, and Cedarbaum removed her reading glasses each time he answered a question so she could study his face. After the preliminaries, she began: "I have to discuss some other things with you…"
"Sure."
"…because I want to be sure that this plea is entirely voluntary and that you are entering it with full understanding of the consequences of entering a plea of guilty."
He was going to plead guilty. The reporter next to me turned, his eyes opened wide. Meanwhile Shahzad was interrupting.
"Before you do that can I say to you my plea of guilty? I just want to say a small statement."
"I think you should wait."
After several questions, Cedarbaum asked, "Why do you want to plead guilty?"
"I want to plead guilty and I'm going to plead guilty 100 times forward because until the hour the US pulls its forces from Iraq and Afghanistan and stops the drone strikes in Somalia and Yemen and in Pakistan and stops the occupation of Muslim lands and stops Somalia and Yemen and in Pakistan, and stops the occupation of Muslim lands, and stops killing the Muslims and stops reporting the Muslims to its government, we will be attacking US, and I plead guilty to that.
"OK," he went on, fumbling with some paper. "With the assistance…"
"Don't read it," the judge said. "I want to know what happened. Tell me what you did."
Shahzad tried again to read something because, he said: "It covers all the elements." But then he gave up and just started talking.
"Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan," he said uncertainly. "I… with them, I did the training to wage an attack inside United States of America."
"I see. How to make a bomb or how to detonate a bomb? What were you taught?"
"The whole thing: how to make a bomb, how to detonate a bomb, how to put a fuse, how many different types of bombs you can make." Shahzad went through the previous year with her. He became a US citizen in May 2009, then left on 2 June for Pakistan ("for good") with the intention of "trying to figure out a way to get to the Taliban". He stayed with his parents in their Peshawar house. Finally on 9 December, he and two friends made contact with the Taliban in Waziristan where he stayed until 25 January 2010. His actual bomb-making training lasted only five days.
"Is there a particular Taliban?" Cedarbaum asked at one point.
"Well, there are two Talibans; one is Taliban Afghanistan, the other is Taliban Pakistan. And I went to join the Taliban Pakistan."
"I see. Has that always been there?"
"It recently… they… the organisation was made… was made, like, six years ago when the first time Pakistan took a U-turn on the Taliban Afghanistan, and obviously the tribal area in Pakistan is the… was the harbouring for the mujahideen fighting in Afghanistan. So the Pakistan took a U-turn and they became allied with US and they went against the Taliban and start fighting and killing them. So during that time, the Afghan Taliban made a group to encounter the Pakistan government forces, and that's when Taliban Pakistan came into being. Six years ago, maybe."
"Do the people you dealt with in the Taliban all speak English?" she asked him.
"No, they speak Pashto. Pashto is my mother language. I am Pashtun ethnically."
The operation's financing was under 10 grand; Shahzad supplied $4,500 of his own money, the Taliban added $4,900. "When I came back on 2 February, I started… started planning on the plan," he explained. "So I started looking for a place first to rent and slowly got together what I think could make a bomb… It took me from February up to end of April to do all that.
"The bomb was – it was in three sections that I made the bomb. The major was the fertiliser bomb. That was in the trunk. It was in a cabinet, a gun cabinet. The second was… if that plan of the actual, that didn't work, then the second would be the cylinder, the gas cylinders I had. And the third I had was a petrol, a gas to make fire in the car. But seems like none of those went off, and I don't know the reason why they didn't go off. "
"When did you expect them to go off? How long did you think it would take?"
"Two and a half to five minutes. I was waiting to hear a sound, but I couldn't hear any sound, so I thought it probably didn't go off, so I just walked to the Grand Central and went home."
Cedarbaum, perhaps confused by the prosaic act of catching a suburban train after planting a lethal bomb, asked whether he did intend for the bombs to go off. Oh yes, Shahzad told her. And he chose Times Square on a Saturday night so he could maximise the mayhem? "Yes. Damage to the building and to injure or kill people. But again, I would point out one thing in connection to the attack, that one has to understand where I'm coming from, because this is… I consider myself a mujahid, a Muslim soldier. The US and the Nato forces, along with 40, 50 countries, has attacked the Muslim lands. We… " Cedarbaum interrupted: "But not the people who were walking in Times Square that night," she said slowly. "Did you look around to see who 'they' were?"
"Well, the people select the government. We consider them all the same. The drones, when they hit…"
"Including the children?" the judge interrupted Shahzad once again.
There was a long pause.
"Well, the drone hits in Afghanistan and Iraq," he finally said, "they don't see children, they don't see anybody. They kill women, children, they kill everybody. It's a war, and in war, they kill people. They're killing all Muslims."
"Now we're not talking about them; we're talking about you."
"Well, I am part of that. I am part of the answer to the US terrorising the Muslim nations. I'm avenging the attacks because the Americans only care about their people, but they don't care about the people elsewhere in the world when they die. Similarly, in Gaza Strip, somebody has to go and live with the family whose house is bulldozed by the Israeli bulldozer. There's a lot of aggression…"
"In Afghanistan?"
"In Gaza Strip."
"I see."
"We Muslims are one community. We're not divided."
"Well, I don't want to get drawn into a discussion of the Qur'an."
Shahzad's reasoning, shared by suicide bombers in Gaza, Sri Lanka and elsewhere, was that his act was a war tactic. Aerial bombing by states cannot avoid killing children. Hence terror bombings by militants that kill children are a logical response.
The anti-terror police have a programme (so far successful) to prevent another 9/11, but it cannot address root causes – American foreign policy – and the chances that the mediocre son of a self-made military man will try to show his father what's what. Some attacks don't need the authorities to prevent them, however. Shahzad was as sub-par a soldier as he was a financial analyst. In court he told Judge Cedarbaum that he still didn't know why his triple-redundant bomb failed to ignite sometime after 6.30 on a Saturday night.
"The timer on the detonator, it was on military time," a police source later told me. "He set it for 7.00. That was 7am on this thing. For 7pm, what he wanted, it should have been 19.00."
This article appears in Granta 112: Pakistan (£12.99) which is out now. For a special Observer offer, go to http://www.guardian.co.uk/extra/2010/sep/13/granta-special-offer
